Phenomena...
...are repeatable events or persistent things. 

A suggestion for a rule:

If it's not repeatable or persistent then science can't make use of it.

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Here 'science' is 'the system of thought we use to better describe and understand the universe (particularly the corner we inhabit).'

'Repeatable' means--as it sounds--over and over again as many times as we wish to carry out an experiment or observation. This eliminates from the category of phenomena: Something that only maybe happened once, particularly anecdotes.  (See also below concerning anecdotes.)

'Persistence' means something continues to be physically present. It is a re-statement of the idea of repeatability; if a phenomenon persists then it repeats its presence; 'I'm still here, I'm still here...'

It's interesting (to me) to try and work with these definitions to see if there is any way around them.  Are there non-repeatable non-persistent things or events that are nevertheless an important part of our source material for science? How about a meteor streaking through the sky or a meteorite crashing into a forest? Obviously we can't ask for the meteorite to go back up and come down again, and if we can't find it after searching the forest then it is hardly persistent. And yet many scientists have devoted their lives to studying meteors. What gives?

Consider an event similar to the meteor problem that also has relevance to cosmology. Again it seems to violate the repeatable/persistent criterion on the surface. In 1054 A.D. in the constellation of Taurus there suddenly appeared an incredibly bright star--brighter than the planet Venus--that could be seen in the daytime for 23 days (so we are told). Gradually it faded and was only visible at night for the next two years.  And then it faded out altogether, too dark to see by eye. So it was sort of persistent but... only for a couple of years. 

If the accounts written down by the people who saw it then were all we had then that would be it. Interesting anecdote and nothing persistent to work with. Without any corroborative evidence it would be a non-phenomenon. As astronomers we'd have to shrug and move on.  Yet what a pity; it's a pretty remarkable story, this star just appearing in the sky one day, incredibly bright; it sure would be nice if we could look into it a little further and maybe fit it into our jigsaw puzzle of how the sky works.

Happily that's not it; evolving technology comes to the rescue. Over the last few centuries our telescopes have gotten much better and we can now see the dim remnant that used to be this bright star. Not just that but we can also see a cloud of gas surrounding that star, and we can see other sudden-brightness events happening elsewhere in the sky. They are not so bright that we can see them in daylight by eye but the change in brightness is still there on the photographic plates.

In fact there is a double success for science here: First telescope technology has recovered that star and expanded it into something we can see, with all sorts of accompanying details about the cloud of gas.  Second, we have a mathematically precise physical theory of what happens to stars when they run out of fuel, and this theory includes big bright explosions. So we have managed to rescue that bright star from 1054 and bring it into the list of phenomena that we understand in the broad picture. Perhaps we need an extension of the definition: Transient events have to occur often enough to be observable and 'expectable', and then that class of event becomes a phenomenon.

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Some history
A number of tricky devices were built circa 1880--1940 that generated a host of new phenomena and propelled physics forward.  The historical myth surrounding this time is classic human drama.  (Whether or not this is how it really went is a harder question to answer; Steven Jay Gould always emphasized that it is much easier to repeat myths than look up what actually happened.) The myth states that the world's (Europe's) theoretical physicists rather smugly thought that they had reached the end of the line in physics, and aspiring young physicists would do better for job security to go into chemistry or architecture or street busking.  This was because there seemed nothing that physics could not explain in 1895, other than a few small details here and there that would soon be taken care of. 

But just as it seemed the closure of physics was assured, the other physicists, the experimental physicists started producing a whole Pandora's box of these annoying small details--seemingly at will, repeatedly, over and over--which persisted in defying explanation.  The experimentalist had stumped the theoretician, and soon all sense of finito was gone and everyone conceded that physics was utterly mystifying, say in 1902.  It amuses me to imagine that the experimentalists thought they were playing a pretty good joke on the theoreticians, knocking over their complacent orthodoxy, but the theoreticians only smiled to themselves at these wonderful unexplained catastrophes and went back to their drawing boards, relieved that they had alls sorts of job security after all. 

In hindsight the phenomena that came pouring out of the new infernal machines around the turn of the 19th century onward are associated with items or objects or devices or units or crumbs or particles or bits of stuff or very small rocks or... things that necessarily had to be very very small.  Paradoxically these phenomena must produce some effect that is observable on our human scale, the scale of human eyes and ears (and human fingers when we touch the wrong bit of metal) otherwise we wouldn't think anything was happening.  That is, recording devices that tally or record events from the very-small-world must do so on a human-sized scale.

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Philosophically (and practically) this is interesting to me: How we bridge the size gap between small events and big recording devices.  The transition must occur through some sort of magnification process, perhaps a cascade effect where some small event triggers an avalanche that eventually becomes large enough to see.  Magnification is involved in film plates, Geiger counters, photomultiplier tubes, cloud chambers, microscopes and all other detectors.  It is therefore important that the avalanche is itself not part of the mystery, but rather provides a faithful indication of what is happening at the smallest scale.

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Anecdotes.
My friend Matt Heavner is fond of the saying 'the plural of anecdote is not data'. No amount of anecdotal evidence is real source material for the science gristmill unless it meets the repeatable/persistent criterion. However it's important to understand and acknowledge that an anecdote may be true and credible. Any given anecdote has a context that establishes it's degree of credibility.

A highly credible anecdote like "I think I saw a corkscrew track in my cloud chamber" can motivate further attempts to record a legitimate corkscrew path. I might for example build in a stronger magnet in a slightly different location to try and increase my chances of producing a corkscrew track repeatably until I have photographed dozens of them.  On the other hand a low-credibility anecdote is valueless. The statement--should one subscribe to it--has interesting implications.  For example thing it implies that every single alien encounter/abduction anecdote ever told has contributed precisely nothing to the field of astrobiology. Which is a shame considering how much effort has gone into all of them. Collectively the human race has more evidence for the existence of the Easter Bunny than it does for the existence of visiting aliens, so that week after week I was consistently disappointed when the Easter Bunny was completely ignored on The X Files.

Some anecdotes are very valuable, others not so; the matter often depends on context, and ultimately we still come back to needing repeatability and persistence--real phenomena--when it comes to making progress in science.
 
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